THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 817, April 12, 2015Rush, you are a glow-in-the-dark statist asshole.If we had to rely on you for freedom, we'd all bein chains, electrocuted into insensibility, coveredwith bruises, and dripping with Mace and pepperspray. You have become a first class copsucker.

America has a problem. People don't generally avoid speaking of
it, but, to my knowledge, no one has offered any kind of solution to
it. The failure to address it properly has changed the character of the
nation.

That problem is the police. They and their supporters will tell
you a very different story, but they are almost self-evidently
over funded, far too heavily armed, and there are vastly too many of
them. Worst, they are almost never held to account for anything they
do.

I first became aware of this situation when I watched four police
cars parked on a side street, the officers that they had contained
interacting (I won't attempt to characterize it any further than that)
with a single, solitary bicyclist whom they had pulled over. For what,
speeding? I had been an auxiliary or reserve police officer, myself,
in the early 70s, and I thought this was at least somewhat excessive.
Short of hand grenades, there is very little that an individual can do
on a bicycle that justifies the presence and attention of four police
officers.

But little did I know, there was far worse to come. We all began
to hear of unarmed individuals being firing-squadded to death,
sometimes forty times, of victims being tasered to death—killed by
the overuse of a "non-lethal" weapon—of elderly or crippled people
yanked out of cars they were passengers in (sometimes their windows
were smashed in with nightsticks) and variously brutalized. Of
restrained and helpless people being raped with nightsticks. I am not
particularly race-conscious, so I don't recall if there was that kind
of pattern to the behavior in question, as is being claimed now by
figures with the reliability and trustworthiness of Reverend Al
Sharpton.

These events were exacerbated by a steady flow or war-surplus
machinery to local departments from the federal government, including
artillery and tanks. As any man can tell you, if you are given nifty
toys, you'll find some excuse to use them. Whimpering that they were
"outgunned" on the streets (more or less exactly as the Founding
Fathers intended), the police began to arm themselves with
fully-automatic weapons like the M-16 and with 15-shot automatic
pistols. Then, of course, there was the Kevlar body armor: not
altogether bullet-proof, but enough to lower the personal cost of
failing to deal with people in a civilized manner. And jungle or
desert war-zone camouflage, for no good reason I've ever managed to
elicit.

After more than a decade of hearing—probably every day,
certainly every week,—about one outrageous example after another of
police brutality and authority abuse, and listening to various pundits
(not all of them right-wingers) deny it's happening, I have this to
say to the foremost among them: Rush, you are a glow-in-the-dark
statist asshole. If we had to rely on you for freedom, we'd all be in
chains, electrocuted into insensibility, covered with bruises, and
dripping with Mace and pepper spray. You have become a first class
copsucker.

Thus, was today's American police state born. It didn't exactly
happen without warning. In books like Time Enough For Love, for
example, conservative/libertarian Robert A. Heinlein wrote about
brutal and corrupt local police forces, in turn-of-the 19th-century
urban Missouri, stating that black people had always known better what
the police were really all about than white people did. Now, we all
know.

So what can we do about it, then? Always remembering that it took
373 years, from 1492 to 1865, to abolish slavery, and that the Irish
fought for their freedom for 850 years, we must resign ourselves to a
long, patient campaign. People's minds must be changed about the
police. As the pointy end of the New World Order spear, the police
must be made to give up their military war surplus. A simple statute
could accomplish that. They must be limited, as they once were, to
keeping the peace, with six-shot revolvers and four-shot shotguns. No
automatic weapons, no noxious gas or spray, no Tasers. It is
absolutely vital that their authority come from their community, not
weapons.

To restore individual dignity and sovereignty to the process,
handcuffs or restraints of any kind,should only be used when there is
probable cause to use them, and, in any case, should require a lot of
paperwork.

The police, as we know them, did not exist when this country was
founded. If they knew that it would come to this, the Founders would
be horrified. The police are the "standing army" they all hated and
feared. The principal law-enforcement official of the region was the
County Sheriff. Unlike municipal police, safe behind multilayered
walls of bureaucracy, if he didn't do his job right, or threw his
weight around, he'd be recalled, or put out on his ass on election
day.

Every city in America is located in, or consists of, a county.
Grant police authority (six-shot revolvers, four-shot shotguns, no
Tasers or Kevlar) to the democratically accessible office of the
Sheriff. Recruiting or maintaining a municipal police force should be
unlawful.

A civilian review board must be appointed for each controversial
incident, its members chosen from the general pool of jury members.
The result will be a society,locally controlled, that is truly
self-governing. And Officer (Deputy) Friendly will be back on his beat
again.

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